Why you should plan absences as a human resources manager
Yes, absence planning is additional effort at first glance. But in growing companies, the effort caused by a lack of planning is also growing.
On the one hand, HR managers should naturally keep track of who can be expected at the workplace at all times in order to keep their own time demands low. Do employees come to you to ask how much vacation time they have left? Then ask yourself why they don't keep track of it themselves. Through good absence planning and communication, you can prevent such efforts.
In addition, there are the effects on the actual work: In complex work processes, colleagues and supervisors must be able to rely on everyone being ready to work as planned. It is completely irrelevant whether you work in civil engineering, gastronomy or in any other industry. Friction losses due to poorly planned processes rapidly reduce productivity in any field. Of course, absence planning is not yet duty or project planning, but it is an important pillar.
The obvious solution: pen & paper
Why not, right? Of course, if all of your employees and co-workers meet in the same place every day, you can do your absence planning very practically on a flipchart or magnetic board. It's simple and pragmatic, and you're probably using resources you already have available to you to do it.
But if your employees work in different places, or if your building is quite spread out, planning absences can be difficult. They say that every aisle makes you slim, but that's usually not enough motivation. As a result, absences are usually discussed directly within the team and the overview from the top is lost.
This solution is also at a disadvantage when it comes to one of the most common reasons for absence - illness - because those who are ill stay at home or even have to go to hospital. Who then updates the absence planning? That's right, you. And do your colleagues find out right away? Probably not. And that's to say nothing of the time and effort involved in electronic notification of incapacity to work.
Pandora's Box: Excel
Microsoft Excel (or comparable products like Google Spreadsheets or Open Office Calc) is the all-round solution par excellence. Everyone knows it, everyone uses it, some can do it. Of course, you can also plan your absences in Excel. All over the internet you can find a lot of templates to turn your endless spreadsheet into the perfect planning.
And there are good reasons for that: Excel is incredibly versatile. You can map practically anything that can be calculated in Excel. In contrast to the analog solution, you can make the file available in the company network and thus also enable remote access. Microsoft's Office 365 Cloud or, if you use Google, Google Drive, go one step further and even let you publish the file to the cloud, so authenticated users without access to the VPN can also access the absence planning.
In addition, Excel allows you to calculate key figures and evaluate your absence planning. If you need to report sick leave or staffing levels to management or want to monitor them on your own initiative, Excel offers you all the options you need.
However, Excel usually reaches its limits in daily use not because it lacks functions, but because it offers too many. The sheer range of formulas, buttons and macros ensures that it simply overwhelms many users. And if only one reference changes, you usually have a whole series of error messages to deal with. And if the "main developer" of the Excel spreadsheet is sick or on vacation or even leaves the company, knowledge is often lost and the Excel spreadsheet can no longer be operated properly.
On the way to the group: absence planning in your ERP
Above a certain size, you will probably rely on an ERP anyway, in order to bundle all company processes in one system. If supply chains, accounting and personnel from several locations have to be managed and optimized simultaneously, you can't do without a good ERP.
Of course, most ERPs also offer modules for personnel management, which in turn include staff scheduling and absence planning. And of course it makes sense to use the solution in a system that is already in place anyway.
However, since this option exists mainly for larger companies, you should not underestimate the prices. As a rule, not only the solution itself costs a lot of money, but also the developer support, since every company is structured differently and therefore usually needs special solutions that the standard version cannot provide despite its complexity.
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